Journal nightcats's Journal: Paul Krugman on the Connectivity Power Shift 360
The numbers are startling. As recently as 2001, the percentage of the population with high-speed access in Japan and Germany was only half that in the United States. In France it was less than a quarter. By the end of 2006, however, all three countries had more broadband subscribers per 100 people than we did.
when the Bush administration put Michael Powell in charge of the F.C.C., the digital robber barons were basically set free to do whatever they liked. As a result, there's little competition in U.S. broadband -- if you're lucky, you have a choice between the services offered by the local cable monopoly and the local phone monopoly. The price is high and the service is poor, but there's nowhere else to go.
well, (Score:5, Funny)
The price is high and the service is poor, but there's nowhere else to go.
How about Europe or Japan?Re: (Score:2)
idiots (Score:2)
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Re:well, (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly. Libertarians will hate this idea, but the free market can not fix everything. That is because the free market has a weakness: monopolies. Over time, companies purchase and consume one another until one, dominant entity takes over a section of the market. Copyright, patent, and trademark law protect the monopoly and prevent competitors from establishing themselves. At that point, all innovation stops. The evidence is out there in industry after industry from telephones to software.
And again, libertarians will hate this, but the government must step in for cases like this. The government needs to shake these companies up and break up their monopolies. Only once we get some actual competition will we get good service.
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So you need government to prevent what government created, and you think libertarians are confused?
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There's lots of precedent for a market regulated for maximum competitiveness being a very productive force. If you let the free market stay completely unregulated, you get the restoration of the monopolies. Markets hate to be free, because everybody's always trying to corner it. So it takes regulation to keep everybody honest.
Re:Monopolies will form, regardless. (Score:5, Informative)
You obviously fail to grasp the ideas behind libertarianism, so you're hardly qualified to criticize them.
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Re:Monopolies will form, regardless. (Score:5, Funny)
Nihilists don't blow up factories ! Those are fiedists, not nihilists. Nihilists simply don't see the point in blowing anything up and believe the workers and owners should simply give it all up since it doesn't matter anyway !
You fail to grasp the utter pointlessness of nihilism so you're hardly qualified to use them in your post.
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The copyright that protects a musician should not, also, be used to allow the RIAA to dictate technology policy throughout the U.S.. In the same way, specific patents that protect the start up biomedical company are good while
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In libertarian theory, there is a cap on these monopolies ability to overprice goods. People will start
The real question (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:The real question (Score:5, Informative)
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There was a time when everyone thought that the Europeans and the Japanese were better at business than we were. In the early 1990s airport bookstores were full of volumes with samurai warriors on their covers, promising to teach you the secrets of Japanese business success. Lester Thurow's 1992 book, ''Head to Head: The Coming Economic Battle Among Japan, Europe and America,'' which spent more than six months on the Times best-seller list, predicted that Europe would win.
Then it all changed, and American despondency turned into triumphalism. Partly this was because the Clinton boom contrasted so sharply with Europe's slow growth and Japan's decade-long slump. Above all, however, our new confidence reflected the rise of the Internet. Jacques Chirac complained that the Internet was an ''Anglo-Saxon network,'' and he had a point -- France, like most of Europe except Scandinavia, lagged far behind the U.S. when it came to getting online.
What most Americans probably don't know is that over the last few years the situation has totally reversed. As the Internet has evolved -- in particular, as dial-up has given way to broadband connections using DSL, cable and other high-speed links -- it's the United States that has fallen behind.
The numbers are startling. As recently as 2001, the percentage of the population with high-speed access in Japan and Germany was only half that in the United States. In France it was less than a quarter. By the end of 2006, however, all three countries had more broadband subscribers per 100 people than we did.
Even more striking is the fact that our ''high speed'' connections are painfully slow by other countries' standards. According to the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, French broadband connections are, on average, more than three times as fast as ours. Japanese connections are a dozen times faster. Oh, and access is much cheaper in both countries than it is here.
As a result, we're lagging in new applications of the Internet that depend on high speed. France leads the world in the number of subscribers to Internet TV; the United States isn't even in the top 10.
What happened to America's Internet lead? Bad policy. Specifically, the United States made the same mistake in Internet policy that California made in energy policy: it forgot -- or was persuaded by special interests to ignore -- the reality that sometimes you can't have effective market competition without effective regulation.
You see, the world may look flat once you're in cyberspace -- but to get there you need to go through a narrow passageway, down your phone line or down your TV cable. And if the companies controlling these passageways can behave like the robber barons of yore, levying whatever tolls they like on those who pass by, commerce suffers.
America's Internet flourished in the dial-up era because federal regulators didn't let that happen -- they forced local phone companies to act as common carriers, allowing competing service providers to use their lines. Clinton administration officials, including Al Gore and Reed Hundt, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, tried to ensure that this open competition would continue -- but the telecommunications giants sabotaged their efforts, while The Wall Street Journal's editorial page ridiculed them as people with the minds of French bureaucrats.
And when the Bush administration put Michael Powell in charge of the F.C.C., the digital robber barons were basically set free to do whatever they liked. As a result, there's little competition in U.S. broadband -- if you're lucky, you have a choice between the services offered by the local cable monopoly and the local phone monopoly. The price is high and the service is poor, but there's nowhere else to go.
Meanwhile, as a recent article in Business Week explains, the real French bureaucrats used judicious regulation to promote competiti
Another problem... (Score:4, Insightful)
It's like the problem we had in the US of upgrading television stations to Hi-Def. In Europe, you only have to upgrade two or three transmitters per country. In the US you have hundreds of transmitters dotted throughout the country (not to mention the added trickiness of local ownership of individual local television stations)...
Re:Another problem... (Score:5, Interesting)
At times, I wonder if the "spread out America" card gets played a bit too much. Most Americans live in fairly concentrated regions. How much of the difference between US, European and Japanese broadband adoption is really about density?
Re:Another problem... (Score:5, Informative)
In the entire 50 states of the US, the population density is: 31 per square kilometer (172nd in the world).
California is 83.85 per square kilometer.
New York (state) is 155.18 per square kilometer.
Massachusetts is 312.68 per square kilometer.
Washington State is 34.20 per square kilometer.
By contrast, Montana is 2.39 per square kilometer.
Japan is 337/km per square kilometer.
Germany is 230.9/km per square kilometer.
What I can't find quickly (and what would be useful) would be to see what percentage of Americans live in or near cities versus their European counterparts. I can't say for certain, but my guess based on the above would be that the number would be significantly less in the United States...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by
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city population density (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Another problem... (Score:5, Informative)
New York (state) is 155.18 per square kilometer.
Massachusetts is 312.68 per square kilometer.
Washington State is 34.20 per square kilometer.
By contrast, Montana is 2.39 per square kilometer.
Finland has 15.5
Countries which tend to rank among the highest in this regard. If California has four times the population density as well as a much larger population in absolute numbers, I don't really see how this would be a factor against the infrastructure.
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I now live across the river
Yes and no (Score:5, Interesting)
1. Densities per whole state can be a bit misleading, because the USA has a ton of farmland or just empty space. The communities you need to connect (first) tend to be a bit more concentrated. Even if you take Montana as an example, I'm willing to bet that even the villages there have a bit more than 2.39 people per square kilometer. (Unless they're all hermits.)
By comparison, western Europe simply has less empty space to screw up the maths. For example, North Rhine-Westphalia [wikipedia.org] (the heavily industrialized county in the NW of Germany) is almost one contiguous megalopolis spread across a whole state. Not exactly, but almost. You only know that, say, Düsseldorf [wikipedia.org] (land capital city) ended and Duisburg [wikipedia.org] ('nother city next to it) started only because the shields on the highway say so. There's just not that much empty space to screw up the maths.
2. If population spread was the real problem, then in the USA the major cities should all be on Ethernet, which AFAIK isn't the case. I mean, high population density = good for broadband, right?
Cities are a lot less dense down here in Germany, and while there isn't as much suburb sprawl (for lack of space and a different culture), houses are rarely higher than 3-4 floors (including ground floor) even in a densely populated area like NRW. The NRW has 18 million inhabitants spread over 34,083 square kilometres, which means some 528 people per square kilometre. Of course it's not uniform, but take it as a rough ballpark figure.
Düsseldorf itself ends up at 2681 people per square kilometre, according to Wikipedia, and that's a major German city.
By comparison, New York City packs 8.2 million people within 830 square kilometres, which means around 10,000 people per square kilometre, or about 4 times the density of Düsseldorf, 20 times the density of the NRW or 40 times the density of Germany. They should have some _awesome_ network access then, right? The New York City metropolitan area packs 18.8 million inhabitants in 8680 square kilometres, so the density is around 10 times that of Germany, 4 times that of the NRW and slightly less than Düsseldorf. (But the last one is slightly misleading since it's comparing the whole sprawl including suburbs and satellite towns to just the main city area of Düsseldorf. The comparison to the whole NRW is a lot more accurate.)
3. But that all becomes a lot less relevant when you notice that density doesn't correlate to net access that well in Europe either. E.g.:
A. Actually the best places for net access aren't in such dense industrial areas of Germany, but actually in many rural areas. Somehow the Telekom ended up upgrading the net access to some villages and small-ish towns before the larger and denser cities.
B. Among countries, the best access is in countries like... Sweden. According to the link you posted, it ends up at 20 inhabitants per square kilometre, which is considerably lower than the USA.
Ok, so there the frozen north is mostly empty space, so let's look up Stockholm on Wikipedia. Stockholm itself is pretty packed, at 4,136 people per square kilometre, but then that's still peanuts compared to, say, New York City. If you take it together with its suburbs, i.e., the whole metropolitan area, it's a meager 499 people per square kilometre. Compared to the NYC metropolitan area, it's outright sparse. Some of the suburbs have as low as 80 people per square kilometre.
Basically, to wrap this long rant up, population density doesn't seem to correlate to net access _that_ well. Sure, noone drags optical fibre to some lone hut on the top of a mountain, but you don't need ultra-packed communities to get broadband either. And in between those extremes, the correlation is at best imperfect, and at worst non-existant.
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Reform your electoral systems, people! PR is the way!!!
Godwin time! (Score:3, Funny)
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At first I thought this easily backed up my suspicion that, as you put it, the "spread out America" excuse doesn't work so well.
But then I checked out a global map of population distribution [wikipedia.org] and now, after all thi
Re:Another problem... (Score:5, Informative)
The US has ~31 people per sq km, Australia is 1/100th the density with ~0.3 people per sq km, yet 97% of the population have a choice of service providers. The reason for this is that the copper network owners are required by law to lease their lines to competitors at "wholesale" prices, the leasing rules are a similar concept to what google is proposing for the spectrum auction.
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Population density does have a discernable impact on price/performance but it is only one of many variables.
Disclaimer(s):
1. I screwed up the math in my original post, Oz has ~3.0ppl/sq.km. and is a tenth of the density of the US
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You clearly neither work in telecom, nor have you spent much time in the country, because you got it completely ass backwards. Dense population centers are the hardest, because of the politics, the coordination with all the other infrastructure (you don't just start methodically shutting down roads in cities on a whim), there are few clear lines of sight, etc. Out in the country, you ca
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Really? Odd. There's hills and ravines here, and its not the backwoods of anywhere -- city of 300k (plus suburban sprawl to the north) is about 15 miles away, and this town had about 18k people as of the 2000 census. You'd be lucky to see a half mile before another ridge is in the way. Foliage is pretty dense too, which plays hell with microwave links, and the trees have a tendency to grow rapidly.
And small town pol
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Contradicting myself again (Score:3, Insightful)
Lots of those high rise office buildings have fibre connections. The cities you mention are among some of the prime switching points for the internet. The available bandwidth is obscene.
There are available technologies for getting the bandwidth from where it's switched to the common citizen without negotiating a million rights of way. They are not employed for the reason in my post below: the incumbent monopolies have an unlimited budget to maintain the scarcity - and as such the price - of their produc
Not this old lame excuse again (Score:5, Insightful)
Every time somebody trots out this lame excuse I will persist in pointing out that in bucolic Ephrata, Washinton - the middle of nowhere on the road to nowhere - they have gigabit broadband. That's fiber to the premises and gigabit Ethernet to the house, a symmetrical unmetered gigabit link to each subscriber, for less than I pay to Comcast each month.
They get it through their power company and they're grandfathered in but I can't get that deal because the big players bought legislation prohibiting municipal broadband.
So stop already with the story that the last mile is expensive, bandwidth is costly, density is the key lies already. It's about the incumbent monopolies maintaining their profits at the cost of depriving the average citizen of necessary infrastructure full stop.
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Try again (Score:2)
The service is available to almost everyone in the county. Density is low so the county is huge.
Now how many counties does that golden river of bandwidth flow through? Surely extending that one county over, or two, is no big deal. How many of these mainlines are there, and how many counties are within 100km of one? A: Many and Most of them.
In the 90's I went out and watched them lay this cable. Thousands of strands of single mode glass. How much of it is dark still? 95%?
In short, I call BS.
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There is no terrestrial Hi-Definition television in Europe. There is standard definition DVB-T, and there is limited hi-def on satellite and a bit on cable. Europe has generally decided to wait for 1080p and analog turn-off before pushing terrestrial HD.
On the other hand, there
Re:Another problem... (Score:5, Insightful)
And this is the final kicker. AT&T is putting fiber in our area, but first in the neighborhoods that already have DSL. They are going to let the cable company continue to have a monopoly in the other areas. To make matters worse, AT&T will not sell you just internet access. You have to buy a package.
I tell you what our president has done. He has reduced America to third world status. INstead of being able to pay a private company to give you good access to the internet, you have pay a monopoly. And you can't pay for what you need, you have to pay for what they want you to have. BTW, this is not a new revelation. Foreign affairs did an write on this a few years back. We did not just all of the sudden lose our edge. It was a predictable part of policy,and has been obvious since before out president got reelected.
Re:Another problem... (Score:4, Insightful)
I tell you what our president has done. He has reduced America to third world status.
Anyone who's spent time in third-world nations knows the falsehood of this ignorant commentary. Let's objectively criticize people for what they really have done - as Bush, Reid and Pelosi have no shortage of legitimate criticisms. Our President (and his Congressional counterparts) has exclusively represented the powerful special interests that put him in office in a manner no different than Clinton, Lyndon Johnson (Halliburton's Man, who's wife was a major shareholder of Halliburton until her recent death), FDR, Harry Truman, Nixon, and numerous others. Actually, you'd be hard pressed to find any President who didn't represent elites.
Regarding broadband and the U.S. Federal Government, the Ag bill passed by Congress ~2002/2003 set aside record funds for rural broadband. Senator Harkin (D) of our state was instrumental in its passage, and also instrumental in having the actual rules written to exclusively benefit the incumbent fat-cat monopoly local telcos. Competitors to these tired old local monopolies were written out in the details. This wasn't BushHitlerCo, this was Democrats in Congress along with a Republican administration.
Having worked for a competitor to the incumbents, covering 10 counties, we found funds dried up while tired old ILECs got tens of millions only to sit on the money. Worse yet, permissions for formerly illegal cross-subsidies were enacted, allowing monopolies like Iowa Telecom to apply $3.50 charges to every phone line and dump it into their broadband entity, driving competition out of the market. They kicked competition off of the copper, subsidized from their monopoly business and used monopoly subsidized operations and infrastructure to lower the cost of their broadband business and killed off any real threat. Both Democrats and Republicans were implicit in this gift to their fat-cat buddies.
the Bush administration put Michael Powell in charge of the FCC, the digital robber barons were basically set free to do whatever they liked.
Except the Clinton FCC already set the pace for special deals with incumbents and as mentioned, numerous persons of both parties made sure only their fat cat buddies would get new slush funds.
Read up on the infamous Representative from Bell South, Billy Tauzin, and his efforts [llrx.com] with powerful Democratic Senator Dingell to further reinforce monopoly power in broadband. Tauzin was a Republican and Dingell a Democrat. Both are bought and paid for by the incumbents.
As long as we have fools who believe one side is good and the other evil, we'll have a government exclusively representing fat-cat special interests while us fools get screwed. Get your head out of the sand if you don't like being screwed.
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It could be worse (Score:4, Informative)
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Right! This calls for immediate discussion!
Yeah.
What?!
Immediate.
Right.
New motion?
Completely new motion, eh, that, ah-- that there be, ah, immediate action--
Ah, once the vote has been taken.
Well, obviously once the vote's been taken. You can't act another resolution till you've voted on it...
Credit Card Required to Read the Article (Score:2)
3 choices will solve this (Score:2)
Right now, the situation was changed with W. in HEAVY favor of all comm companies. It will be interesting to see what the FCC will do with Googles request for the 700 MHZ bandwidth.
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Triple Play for EUR 30 (Score:5, Interesting)
Local Cable Monopolies Exist... Not National. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Local Cable Monopolies Exist... Not National. (Score:4, Informative)
People used to complain to my peers and me on the cable advisory board that we shouldn't be giving Time Warner a monopoly over cable service. We showed them the laws on the subject. Anyone is free to offer cable service, it's just that no one wants to once there is an established player in town.
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economics (Score:2)
All else being equal, the wealth distribution in Western Europe would tend to predict a higher percentage of broadband subscription. Undereducated folks living hand to mouth probably aren't going to shell out for broadband. They may not even have a computer. As a percentage of the total population, that demographic is larger in the U.S. than in Germany or France.
The summary of this article makes the suggestion that it was the Bush appointee's laissez-faire governance of the FCC that allowed monopolies t
Has to be said... (Score:2)
Population density? (Score:2)
No price and no service (Score:2)
But the service sucks.
With 50Mbps at Home why have an office? (Score:4, Interesting)
Choice (Score:3, Funny)
Strange definition of "lucky" (Score:2, Insightful)
Simple reason in germany (Score:3, Insightful)
Traditionally you had to pay for every single phonecall, even local ones. So dialing-in into an ISP _really_ cost you a lot of money. In fact back then most ISPs didn't charge you for their services so you only had to pay to your local phone company.
Then with DSL and cable modems you suddenly got a flat-rate for a moderately low price.
Currently the costs are about this: (all in Euro)
dial-up 0.1 cents/minute => 43.2 Euro a month (wow, this suddenly even became affordable)
DSL is about 50 Euros a month including an ISDN phone-line with flat-rate service for data-calls for all of germany.
Dial-up used to be even more expensive, costing as much as 3 cents per minute.
The difference between countiries (Score:3, Funny)
It takes all kinds in this crazy world of ours.
What Do You Get In The US? (Score:5, Interesting)
I get high speed internet through YahooBB (ADSL), which is now run by Softbank. I pay 4200 yen a month (~$34 at present) for 50 MB/s download speed, which is oversold (bounces between 2 MB/s and 12 MB/s when connecting to sites where I could reasonably expect to get the full benefit, such as iTunes Japan or the WoW bittorrent installer). This includes the basic charge for VoIP phone service but no call time (which is cheap -- 3 cents a minute to the US) and equipment rental (the modem -- should have bought it, would have paid for itself around month 18). I also pay approximately 1800 yen for basic telephone service, a necessary prerequisite for ADSL unless you want your VoIP phone to not be reachable by non-VoIP customers ("uh oh"). There is also the issue of buying a lease for a landline, which is a one time charge of $100 but which theoretically has the same resale value so we'll ignore that for the present.
So, all told, about $50 for high speed service which consistently delivers 2 to 12 MB/s.
What does $50 get in the US these days?
Re:What Do You Get In The US? (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm told other providers in our neighborhood offer equivalent throughput over copper (usen comes to mind), possibly at a lower price. There's also service available from the local electric utility TEPCO. And of course, lower throughput options like YahooBB are also available.
Having informally checked out each of these options, my impression is that at least in our neck of the Tokyo woods, service is not oversold regardless of which of these options you chose.
Friends back in the states to whom I've described this say I'm in for a rude awakening when we move back.
comparing to Canada (Score:2)
Why is that not the same in the US? If there are two companies in the same region, would they not s
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Well, I don't know how old US phone lines are, but the house connection box of my parents read "Reichspost", i.e. the line was established something like 60 years ago.
wrong (Score:2)
DSL runs fine over old copper; it's designed to. Furthermore, with the US building boom over several decades, most Americans probably have fairly new infrastructure anyway.
Throw in some wide distances between communities and you have the situation we have today.
I used to get Internet access using a parabolic. It was cheap, fast, and simple. Unfortunately, a big phone company bought th
Re:Krugman's a fruit (Score:5, Interesting)
The US lags behind because the FCC allows the big industry to do what they want. Heck, we are almost completely back to AT&T and ONLY AT&T in terms of telephone service. The 1982 split that was a part of a lawsuit settlement from the government against AT&T was what allowed AT&T to get into the internet business in the first place. AT&T agreed to split into 7 new companies (plus AT&T), and would be allowed to start developing data network services which is what led to access to the internet for normal businesses and then people at their homes. SBC was formed from Ameritech, Southwest Bell, and Pacific Telesis. SBC then aquirred AT&T itself and BellSouth, and renamed themselves back to AT&T (as that had the more important name, since it had been around since 1883 and was the ORIGINAL telephone company of all telephone companies). So of the 8 companies that AT&T was split into, 5 of them have been merged back together. The other 3 are now down to just two, Verizon and QWest. So in the landmark 1982 settlement that allowed the phone company (AT&T) to get into the internet service business, they are now just three. The Supreme Court settled with AT&T with the stipulation that it was going to be 8 companies that controlled the infrastructure. There was a reason for that because there would be enough companies out there that it would be difficult for them to all collude together and over-charge the customers, because someone would always say, "We can make more net money by cutting our profit margin down lower then the other companies and taking a large portion of their customers". Whereas now, with only three companies, it is easy for them to say, "We can make a LOT more money by steadily increasing the fees and rates we charge, so long as the other two guys see what we are doing and do the same thing, because it will only benefit them as much as it benefits us".
Re:Krugman's a fruit (Score:5, Insightful)
That seems like a reasonable arguement but if that were the case then with the massive housing boom we have been in for the past 10 years we should have a significant number of homes with the latest fiber optic last mile technology, but guess what, we dont.
I've watched thousands of houses go up and hundreds of new neighborhoods, and whats going in the ground you ask, the same coax and twisted pair copper they've been using for the past 30+ years.
And when people get fed up and try to band together to build there own fiber optic network because the digital robber barons refuse to invest in the latest technology do we finally get the latest technology, no we get lawyers and lobbying to turn citizens into criminals and outlaws.
And now with our pathetic outdated infrastructure that provides limited broadband at high prices what are the robber barons trying to do, drop their requirements for network neutrality and charge us and content providers even more for what we've already paid for.
Its not distance or age, its plain and simple greed and governmental complicity with illegal monpolization of markets. This country is getting passed by in the name of capitalism for the few and screw the other half.
It's possible (Score:5, Informative)
This is proof it's possible if those in charge have foresight, plan well, do it right, and don't give in to the pressure of the industry giants who'll try to stop them. Perhaps we should expect more from our
Re:It's possible (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:It's possible (Score:5, Funny)
At least we have lots of aircraft carriers.
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LOL, what a crock. Besides, you chose the wrong countries to compare to. While some telephone deployments in the US may have been a few years ahead of anyone else, Germany and France were pioneers in the field in their own right and were right up there in rolling out infrastructure. We're talking about technology that's over one hundred years old, a few years here or there would most certainly not explain the current state of affairs.
Besi
Re:Krugman's a fruit (Score:5, Informative)
Krugman is actually quite the economist. His text, "Economics," written by him and Robin Wells is used in many universities in introductory courses (it's the number two text, I believe, after the venerable Samuelson), and his text "International Economics," written by him and Maurice Obstfeld is in it's ninth edition. He's a Professor of Economics and International Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton and has had numerous publications during his career, including 38 books. He also was the winner of the American Economics Association's John Bates Clark Medal in 1991 and is considered one of the country's foremost neo-Keynesian economists. As such, I'm fairly sure he has enough fact checkers at his disposal to make sure that his figures and conceptual grounding is much better than yours. You may not believe him or agree with his politics, but he is certainly not a "fruit".
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Back in the USSR and East Block. (Score:2, Troll)
The US lags because we set up our telcom infrastructure the first, and thus have the most primitive last-mile connections. Throw in some wide distances between communities and you have the situation we have today.
This is Bell Bullshit [freepress.net]. The US is a dense urban nation now and the vast majority of people live in cities. The long haul network has lots of dark fiber because our cities are still using copper networks. Ma Bell wants to sell you each bit of data and we are falling further behind despite big p [newnetworks.com]
Re:Krugman's a fruit (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Krugman's a fruit (Score:4, Informative)
Has he made a few errors? Yes, even a few doozies, which have been corrected, ad nauseum. I do believe that he's more vulnerable to fact-checking based errors because he actually works to base his columns on facts, vs. working through baseless assertion and anecdote - paging David Brooks, Maureen Dowd, and many, many others who pretend to be working in fact but instead focus on rhetoric. These "colleagues" (i.e pundits at the NYT and other top-circulated newspapers) are rarely held to the same standard that he is. It's much easier to "let them off the hook" for far more sweeping assertions because their reflecting CW, and not challenging it.
Re:Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
Blame Bush for this? (Score:2)
The politician in my state that signed the prohibition against municipal broadband into law was a Democrat.
Muni broadband is the only known cure for this disease. If you don't fix it where you live, well, the people of central Washington State will be glad to host all of your datacenters and steal most of your high tech jobs.
Response (Score:2)
You're wrong and here's why:
My given example is Ephrata, WA, which has had gigabit broadband for MANY YEARS. I don't live there (yet... thinking about buying a shed for some servers though...). The computers at my local library have 10 Mbit links, unfiltered
Re:That's a subscriber-only feature! (Score:4, Informative)
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So why is Germany's broadband access so much better than New York's? Why is France's broadband so much better than California's?
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1) The government should do its goddamn job and break these monopolistic fuckers up and keep them broken up.
2) The government should do its goddamn job and and quit regulating the big guys into monopoly power.
3) The government should do its goddamn job and get their fingers out of the fucking pie.
4) The government should do its goddamn job and regulate things fairly so that
Naked truth (Score:3, Insightful)
Interesting that Krugman uses France's health care system as a point of comparison. Particularly since the French are beginning to realize they can't afford it any more.
Yes a sublime contrast to our employer-pays health care system where we haven't been able to afford it in years, but have not realized it yet.
Look regardless of how much you might dispute the desirability of the French health care system, the analogy he is making is logically correct. That is, the French are not holding themselves prisoner to free-market ideology.
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Recursive post (Score:2)
Intentional? If so, it's a devilishly clever post.
If not...umm, maybe LGF or DKos would be more suited to your style of discussion. An assumption that we don't share identical politics is not an excuse to abandon simple civility.
Given that Krugman is part of the *actual headline* and the article *explicitly* concerns his take on the "Connectivity Power Shift," my opinion on Krugman's penchant for despair is squarely on topic.
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Well, bensafrickingenius has broadband. I guess we can just about close the book on that one. Good job everybody. That's a wrap.
Hint: The quest
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Remember their $29.99/month ADSL plan while they were charging other ISPs over $32/month just to access the network? They trot out excuses of population density and other red herrings while continuing their predatory robber baron ways and holding us all
The size of the Japanese "Island" (Score:2)
Here, I'll prove it to you: I have listed, in numerically ascending order, the land surface areas of the United Kindom, France, Germany, and Japan below. Can you pick out which one is Japan?
241,590
357